


Show Me Wonderful

by aameyalli



Series: Ikaros Stories [3]
Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Pretty much spoiler free, post lws4 fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-24 03:48:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20351893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aameyalli/pseuds/aameyalli
Summary: After War Eternal, Canach tries to savor some peace and quiet in Amnoon. Prem has something to show him.





	Show Me Wonderful

Canach sprawled on a dusty pile of Elonian carpets, drinking from the bottle and watching his exemplar paint.

Their room was a shabby one above Zalambur’s casino, and they could have afforded better with the gold Canach had won downstairs but Prem had begged for this one, tugging Canach’s sleeve as he dragged him inside, saying “Look at the light!”

And he wasn’t wrong—the late afternoon sun came through the windows like molten gold, like spilled honey, pooling on the old rugs and faded yellow walls and the cot just_ barely_ wide enough to hold them. And on Prem’s canvas: a broad white sheet he’d thrown across the floor. (At least Canach knew it wasn’t _theirs._ It was far too big and clean to have come from this room.)

Prem moved over it in hops and twirls, sometimes blinking in a burst of sparkflies. He had paint splattered up to his elbows and smudged across his nose. He was even humming. Canach knew the tune. It was the one he liked to whistle while setting up his pyrotechnics.

Prem had asked Canach to model for him, but rarely glanced back at him, and what Canach could make out of the painting didn’t look much like a portrait. It looked more like Gorrik’s maps of brandstorms, all infolding swirls and a suspicious amount of purple.

Canach took a long, easy sip of wine. “Do I really need to be here?” he drawled.

“I’d die without my muse,” said Prem, and blinked across the room without looking at him.

Canach tipped his head back against the carpets, content despite himself. Maybe it was the liquor talking, but the way Prem moved when he was happy, Canach could almost swear he left light trails.

* * *

The sunlight flowed over him. From outside the casino, faint strains of laughter, the cries of merchants hawking scarves and incense and skimmer saddles, the heavy beat of a raptor’s footfalls. Someone started playing a tanbur, a low unfamiliar melody, uneven and persistent as the wind out on the sand dunes, and Prem’s hum shifted to follow the tune.

It felt strange to have this place. It was just a rented room but Canach was used to perpetual motion, drifting between disasters, between people and monsters that wanted to use him, never sleeping twice in the same place, never looking back at explosions. He thought he’d always be nomadic like that. He’d never imagined… whatever _this_ was. Days and nights soaking in the desert heat. Prem sharing his bed, stealing bites of his breakfast, coming home late after hours at his job breaking off brand crystals, fixing roads and walls, building for the refugees, for money they didn’t need, and kissing him, and asking if he’d heard any good gossip in the casino today. Prem’s hands were as rough as his voice now from working, but he’d never gotten less careful with them.

This stillness.

He wasn’t even wearing armor, just the light shimmery tunic Prem had chosen for him in the market. It was brown, thankfully, but lighter than anything he’d worn in years.

(“Let me guess, saffron for you?” Canach had taunted as they stood at the stall, casting an eye over Prem’s perpetual blue armor.

But Prem had just grinned—“Who’s gonna say no?”

He looked frustratingly good in yellow.)

Canach should have felt exposed, uncomfortable, without the familiar weight of boots and gauntlets, without an objective. His instinct was always to pull himself shut, put out thorns, trudge forward. But reclining here while his exemplar worked, he felt… Yes. He could say it now. He felt _safe. _Every part of him was like a cat in the sun, stretching.

“Painting’s done,” Prem said brightly.

Canach sat up. In a flash of pink Prem was in front of him, both hands flat against his chest, pushing him back down and almost spilling the wine. “Oh no no no, I didn’t say you could _look._ C’mon Canach, do you owe Grenth a soul?”

He could have done with fewer death jokes, considering the hot pink shawl Prem still had slung around his shoulders. It had slipped a little in his artistic frenzy, revealing the white line across his neck where Balthazar’s chains had caught and burned and pulled, and his voice was still broken, all rasp, in a way that made Canach’s own throat ache.

But Canach was lying on his back, drunk on the hot, dry, spicy air of Amnoon, with his exemplar on top of him, blazing with excitement, and he found suddenly that he had very little to complain about.

Canach kissed him, hard.

“Mmph—What was_ that?”_ Prem spluttered, when he could breathe again. “That was not a kiss, that was—that was an _attack,_ you’d better redeem yourself right now.”

“Oh, are we talking of redemption?” Canach swept a hand at the trail of color Prem had dripped across the floor. “Perhaps you’d better show me what you ruined our apartment for.”

“Alright.” Prem straightened up. “Alright, okay, I’ll show it to you. I’ll show you right now.” But he didn’t move for a long moment, bouncing on his heels, his eyes darting over Canach’s face searchingly, like he was trying to read something written there but kept losing his place and starting over.

“What is it?” said Canach.

“Nothing.” Prem’s mouth quirked up, unconvincingly. “Just building suspense. You should work on your sense of drama.” He swiped the wine bottle from Canach, took a deep swig, then turned and lifted his sheet to the light with a flourish.

Canach went still.

It _was_ a portrait, but not like any he’d seen in Amnoon or the Reach. His own reclining figure was suggested in spirals of color, filled in with patterns of waves and clouds and wriggling animals. He could make out tigers, sand sharks, skimmers, koi. The eyes were two purple crescents, the mouth solemn but kind. His thorns were playful swipes of paint, the farthest thing from sharp. Lavender, yellow, pink, red, mint green, rosy gold.

Canach moved towards it like a sleepwalker, floated his hand just an inch away from the wet paint. “Where did you find these colors?”

Prem‘s smile fell. “They’re yours.”

“Are you delirious?” Canach turned his hand over, showing Prem the drab gray-green of his palm. “I don’t _have_ colors.”

Prem watched him blankly for a second, then raised his eyebrows. “Oh, you’re serious. Okay.” 

He spread the sheet over the floor again, and blinked over to his jars of paint, which were arranged on the windowsills, refracting light in rainbows on the wall. He set the wine down among them with a light clink, dipped a finger into the jar of mint green, and came back to Canach, dashing the finger over his bare arm before he could give more than a muffled grunt of surprise.

“See?” Prem said.

And yes, fine, Canach could see that it mimicked the way his skin looked where it caught the light from the window, slightly iridescent, like a beetle’s back.

“These are from your eyes.” Prem smudged three shades of purple across Canach’s cheek. He grimaced, but didn’t rear back.

“These—“ (The yellows and golds, now gleaming in a spiral on the back of his hand.) “—from your glow.”

“From the tips of your thorns.” (Warm, dusty lavender in a stripe over his nose.)

Prem fingerpainted along the contours of his palms, all the way up his arms, his face and his neck and the hollow at the center of his collarbone. Wherever his hands moved, they left trails of shivers. If Prem noticed the occasional murmur of sound that escaped Canach’s mouth, he didn’t draw attention to it.

So Canach stood still for his ministrations, caught up in the contrast between Prem’s goofy smile and the seriousness of his brown eyes, the way the sunlight edged his hair and shoulders in gold and brushed purple shadows over his mouth, the dreadful, aching lightness of his touch, which brought Canach close to groaning out loud. And caught up too in his own sunstruck curiosity—how had Prem seen all these colors in Canach, when he never had in his own reflection?

He thought of himself as greenish gray and tarry black. Never as colorful. Never _approaching_ anything you’d call “pretty.” That had been shed with his sapling petals, with his delusions of grandeur in Southsun, with everything else that had been taken away from him years ago. And he was comfortable with that, always had been. He didn’t need to be pretty. He didn’t need to be painted over. And yet.

“Is this…” Prem cleared his throat softly. “Is this alright?”

Canach looked down at himself, and Prem’s paint glowed back at him. To his own surprise, he didn’t feel repulsed. Not even angry. Prem was telling the truth—these were_ his_ colors. Nothing here that wasn’t already.

Except…

“You haven’t told me about the red,” Canach said. His voice came out hoarse.

“Ah.” Prem looked down at the shades of scarlet and maroon gleaming on his fingers. “That’s… It’s how I see your voice. You know…” He let out a faint huff of laughter at himself, and put on a syrupy accent—_“Oh Prem, you’re so smart and handsome, won’t you show me that magic trick again, I just can’t control myself when you start slinging spells.”_

Canach rolled his eyes. Mother’s scorn, the man couldn’t say _one_ honest thing without ruining it a second later. But Prem still wasn’t looking at his criminal, so Canach kept his voice quiet, the blow just glancing: “It’s not too late for me to leave you, moron.”

“It’s way too late,” said Prem, and when he lifted his eyes they were dark and sober.

Canach’s breath caught. He swiped away a blot of paint from Prem’s forehead with the pad of his thumb, and gestured to the canvas. “Are you going to paint yourself as well? I think I look rather lonesome.”

Prem puffed his cheeks up with air and blew it out slowly.

“I still don’t know what colors I would use,” he said, in a tone of confession, as if it was something pitiable and faintly disgusting.

Canach had nothing smart to say. He raised his hand to his exemplar’s face. Prem leaned into the touch and wet paint came off Canach’s fingers, leaving crescents of color along Prem’s cheek and jaw. Pink. Gold. Red.

Outside, the sound of the tanbur swelled like a sandstorm, like understanding, like a thunder cloud.

This time, Canach kissed him properly, soft and slow as the afternoon. Prem made a warm, desperate noise deep in his throat, and they fell back into the carpets together.

**...**

“There is paint,” said Canach a long time later, “all over this joke of a garment.”

Prem grinned down at him. “Canach, that’s so sad. We’ll have to buy more. Good thing we saved money on the rent, huh?”

Before Canach could object, Prem had rolled off him, snatched up a coin purse, and hooked his hand around Canach’s elbow, and he was being pulled through the doorway again, down the rough stairs, through the casino’s riot of color and sound, into the open air.

Soon, he was sure, they would be thrown back into the Commander’s blood-splattered world of gods and dragons. But for now they were running together, streaked in paint, towards a silk merchant’s stall, and Prem’s smile was brighter than the fading Amnoon sun.

“Who knows,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “Maybe this time I’ll try red.”

Canach rolled his eyes. Grudgingly and to his own disbelief, he said “Maybe I will, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> title is taken from tom rosenthal's "take over." i've never written romance before so please let me know how i did, and any tips to make it more effective!


End file.
